Best TraceRoute Alternatives for Troubleshooting Hop by Hop Connectivity Issues

Last Updated: August 22nd, 2018 - Paul Anderson

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Traceroute is a popular network troubleshooting tool that will trace the route of a package as it moves from one computer to another. This is a useful tool that not only tests connectivity, but also the path through which data packets travel, and through it, the possible issues that could affect this path such as delays and losses.

This is an old tool that was released way back in 1987. It was first introduced in Unix systems and has since then been adapted to work well on other operating systems too such as Linux, OS X and Windows.

Though traceroute is a widely used tool, it is also highly limited in what it can do from a troubleshooting perspective. For example, this tool will show the path from source to destination, and not the path back. This obviously doesn’t give a complete picture, especially when there are problems in the return path. Also, the results tend to be inaccurate when destinations are load-balanced on many servers.

To overcome these limitations, many developers have come up with alternative for traceroute, so administrators like you can get more out of it.

Here’s the Top Traceroute Alternatives of 2018:

Below is a list of some of the Best Traceroute alternatives available today online – including both free & paid download

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3. MTR (My Traceroute)

MTR (My Traceroute) was originally developed by Matt Kimball in 1997 and this is why it was initially called Matt’s Traceroute. This tool was taken over byRoger Wolffe in 1998 and he changed the name to My Traceroute.

Features

The features of MTR are:

Works well in UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems.

Probes routers on the route path by limiting the number of hops a packet can make as it goes from source to destination. Keeps track of the response time of hops to identify problems.

Probes continuously, about once every second.

Works well in a text console and a GTK+ based graphical user interface.

Relies primarily on ICMP, but also has a UDP mode.

Provides information such as list of routers traversed by a packet, average round-trip time and packet loss.

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Conclusion

In short, traceroute is one of the oldest and most widely used tools for monitoring network and for identifying problems in packet transmission. The original traceroute is more than 30 years old and is highly limited in the information it can provide.

This is why many developers and companies have come up with their own traceroute alternatives, so you can get more information from the traceroute utility.

The above discussed options are free. Some of it require a download while others can be accessed online. We hope you find it useful!